Laravel & AI: Inside Boost With Ashley Hindle  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Laravel Podcast]] - Full Title: Laravel & AI: Inside Boost With Ashley Hindle - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/8fe17d1d-8546-4b2c-a1e7-8c70c72ee48d ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **From Experiments To A Job Offer** - Ashley described posting experiments, giving a Laravel Live UK talk, and meeting Laravel staff which led to a job offer. - His mix of hard work, sharing projects, and serendipity landed him at Laravel quickly. Transcript: Ashley Hindle Yeah, that's a weird one. So I used to work at remote.com. I worked there for about 18 leading an engineering team that built a performance management system for their HR platform. And that was all Elixir and React. And I love Elixir. Like that was a lot of fun. And I left there in January and was trying to figure out what do I want to do with my life? Do i want to stick with elixir do i like big companies like remote do i want to go back to a small startup because before remote i was a cto at a hundred person startup and so you know i like That vibe um do i want to do sales engineering i considered that for a while you know do i want to start a startup i know a couple of angel investors so I could get some funding, you know, go The kind of angel investment VC route. And I do want to be CEO of something someday. So I just took a break and just did lots of things, lots of talking to people, lots of experiments, just what do I want? I'm an old, old man. I need to figure out how I want to spell that type, right? And so I was doing all of this, but I started posting on Twitter lots of things. So I was posting in a couple of months period, just weird CLI experiments that I was doing. And just weird experiments in general, just stuff people shouldn't do really. And then everybody, not everybody, many people are messaging me saying like wherever you come from you're on my feed constantly i can't get rid of you what's going on and because just Because i had all of this free time right like i could freely experiment do anything i liked so i was doing cli experiments lots of ai experiments and lots of mcp experiments and so i submitted A talk to laravel live uk about mcp to teach people what it is what's the hype around it should you care or you know can you ignore it and i was accepted and that was super exciting my first Conference talk on stage this you know June and so just from doing loads of weird stuff and sharing it it's like you can just do things it's like you can just do stuff and share it and stuff Happens and increase your look surface a bit is who knew right so yeah i do the talk at laravel live uk it goes pretty well it is live coding with cursor and ai and mcp so it didn't go a hundred Percent smoothly there were definitely there's some issues there with ai just deciding not to play but hopefully i you know i vamped that enough that it was okay um i got lots of great Feedback and then peter sum was doing mcp experiments at laravel at the exact same time and he was speaking at laravel live uk too about how to use cursor uh super effectively and his talk Was awesome and so i was obsessed with him i was like hey you're at laravel that's where i want to be you're doing mcp stuff that's what i'm doing we should talk right and so we chatted a lot At livewire at livewire laravel live uk. And yeah, and so I learned more about what he was doing. You know, he learned about what I was building at the time called Croft. And we were hanging around after Laravel Live UK at this pub. And then the president of Laravel, Tom Crary, turns up and he's like, hey, we're going to go to this like a enterprise dinner. One of you can come. Well, Peter works at Laravel. He should come. And then he was like, no, I'm joking. You can both come. And so all of a sudden I'm like accidentally at this enterprise dinner with Laravel customers, Laravel staff. Yeah, so like very fortuitous, weird turn of events. And then I actually spent most of the evening just bugging James Brooks because we are so similar and he's so lovely and he's such a lovely human. Matt Stauffer Such a lovely human being. Ashley Hindle It's ridiculous, right? Yeah and he has yeah i really like his thought processes and his values like yeah i got on a lot so i just bugged him most of the night and then tom dm me like a you know a bit later like we're Doing ai stuff you're doing ai stuff you should speak to Taylor and see, like, can we merge these? Like, could you help? I spoke to Taylor. I could help. And he was like, oh, you'll have to speak to Jyoti. You know, he knows what he's doing. He does. So I spoke to Jyoti and he was like, you're all right. You should speak to the director of engineering, Andre, who was on this podcast previously. And I spoke to him and he was like, you seem all right. So let's talk about an offer. And so and that happened, you know, really, really quickly. And I say fortuitously, because when I say I'm lucky, my wife gets upset with me because she's, she says, no, you just put in a lot of work and a lot of effort, like, you know, give yourself Some credit. So, but fortuitously feels like that's a bit of luck and hard work, like combined. ([Time 0:01:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f3e2a3e7-eb07-4a88-8f0b-4b684ca96037)) - **AI As A Pair Programmer** - Ashley views AI as a necessary pair programmer that enables engineers rather than replaces them. - He believes AI helps do more and work cooler things without immediate job loss fears. Transcript: Ashley Hindle I would say I'm closer to along for the ride. I would like to have gone off to a cabin and thought about this properly. So I had a useful answer. I've heard lots of other people's answers, but I don't know how well thought through they are. I think if you're not using AI, you're falling behind. I think it's a necessity in our roles moving forward. I don't think it's taking our jobs anytime soon. It is an enabler. It's an assistant. It's a pair programmer. It's a colleague. It's not a replacement. Maybe it will be in 15, 20 years. I can't see that far forward. But right now, and for the foreseeable, we should use it as an AI pair programmer. That's how I talk about it. That's how I consider it. And GPT-5 was released yesterday and I watched a live stream and I've played with it last night and this morning to see how scared should I be? How good is it? ([Time 0:07:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/40b8f162-a8c0-42d6-95d7-b9688e7265f2)) - **Combine AI-Friendly IDE With Specialized Tools** - Ashley alternates between Cursor and PHPStorm and recommends using Claude Sonnet 4 for coding assistance. - Combine an AI-friendly IDE (Cursor) with specialized tools (PHPStorm) to get best results. Transcript: Ashley Hindle Now? This is a really bad time to ask because what was it a week ago? That's yeah, that's a bad time as well. So for the last, actually, yeah, for the last two weeks, three weeks maybe, I've been going back and forth between Cursor and PHP Storm, always using Claude Sonnet 4. It's the best. But often in PHP Storm, using Claude Code, not Juni. Sometimes I'll use Juni, but often I'll use Clawed code extension within PHPStorm. So technically using Clawed code, but with all the refactoring and PHP specific knowledge that PHPStorm is amazing at, right? And that's why I went from Cursor to PHPStorm, because Cursor is the best IDE for AI type completion and chat, I think. But because it's so general purpose, it doesn't have all of the helpful tools that PHPStorm has, like simplifying fully qualified domain names or extracting methods and properties. ([Time 0:10:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/76558d3a-ea88-4b68-9b05-e0ee78985bb9)) - **Install Boost As Your AI Starter Kit** - Install Laravel Boost to get a ready-made AI coding starter kit with curated rules and integrations. - Use Boost to avoid cobbling together MCP servers and assistant rules yourself. Transcript: Matt Stauffer What is Laravel Boost? Laravel Boost is your AI coding starter kit. Ashley Hindle That's its tagline. It makes it really easy to get started with AI coding in Laravel projects. So you don't have to go and find random MCP servers and random cursor rules and cobble together this whole thing. ([Time 0:13:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/38f8231a-b80a-457b-a5b3-7b60578e8cd9)) - **Steer Agents With Composable Guidelines** - Provide AI agents with explicit composable guidelines so generated code matches your project style. - Let Boost auto-select only relevant guidelines based on installed packages and accept project-specific rules. Transcript: Matt Stauffer Sure. So all AI agents need steering. Ashley Hindle They need help on how you would like them to behave. And they like to be steered. You know, they want those guidelines and rules to do better to help you. So these guidelines are things like write test tests, not PHP unit tests. Or if you're going to run the tests, run a single test, not the entire test suite. You've only changed one test, so just run that test. Or you can say, I don't like to declare strict types at the top of files, so never include that in new files. Things like that. And so they're just advice to the AI. Hey, we're pairing together. This is how I work, and this is how I'd like you to work so that our code looks the same and blends seamlessly so I can easily read and understand your code. So you can easily read and understand my code, right? So yeah, that's how I like to think about them. Matt Stauffer I love it. Yeah. We've been working on a consistent set of rules files for all our various AI tools at Titan. And so I'm super excited to say, now we don't have to start from scratch. Let's just take the boost rules and then see if we have any modifications we're going to make. So I'm very excited about that. Ashley Hindle The boost rules as well are, I call them composable guidelines. So boost will detect the packages you have installed and only include the guidelines that your project actually requires. So if you don't use PEST, you don't get the PEST guidelines, right? If you don't use inertia v3 you don't get the inertia v3 v2 uh guidelines so that helps and also we automatically import any project specific guidelines you have so if you're working On a weird esoteric project you can add guidelines. And when you run boost install, we'll add those to the guidelines too. ([Time 0:14:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f6a06691-ecc5-4b2d-b674-d92790ce78b1)) - **MCP Tools Unlock App-Aware AI** - Boost's MCP server exposes tools that let AI agents interact with your app, run Tinker, fetch browser logs, and query versioned docs. - The search documentation tool filters docs by installed packages and versions, giving highly relevant results. Transcript: Ashley Hindle Yeah, so Boost provides an MCP server so your AI agent can speak to Boost, essentially. And MCP offers lots of functionality, but the main important functionality is that the MCP server, Boost in this case, can provide tools for the AI agent to call. So the AI agent can list the tools from the server and say, hey, what will you help me do? And then it can say, hey, okay, I want to call that specific tool. So Boost, when you add it as an MCP server into your AI agent, will offer you 16 tools out of the box and it allows extensions so you can add your own tools as well if your esoteric project Would benefit from a tool too. The most important or cool ones, I guess, are Tinker to allow the AI agent to execute PHP code within the Laravel application context. So it can use your eloquent models and it can find the latest one and it can sum and aggregate things for you and return information. That's super helpful for debugging issues or testing code snippets. Often, before I use Boost, AI agents love to create random php files like test hyphen this thing hyphen dot php and then it would put some rubbish code in there and then it would fail and Then it would try and run them and then it wouldn't clean them up and so tinker just cleans that up which is super super helpful my second favorite or maybe my favorite, is a browser logs Tool. So when you install Boost, we'll inject some JavaScript via middleware so that your browser logs and errors and exceptions get streamed back to Laravel into your storage logs directory, Into browser.log. So you get access to them. And the AI agent through the browser logs tool also gets access to them. So when you say, oh, it's broken in the browser, you don't have to go to dev tools and copy paste the right thing. It will just know to call the browser logs tool and get the most recent browser logs. And I really, I really love that because I do that a lot. I break the front end a lot and then ask AI to fix it. And then probably the best tool that's hiding a lot behind it is the search documentation tool. So this is the most powerful tool. In the back end, we have an API, the Boost API, and we've ingested and chunked and vectorized all of the documentation for the laravel framework versions major versions for inertia Laravel inertia view inertia react pes3 pes4 php unit um others livewire weWire. Flux UI, all of these things, we've got the documentation for them when we put them into an API that this tool, this MCP tool search documentation can use. And when your AI agent calls it, it passes through the packages that you have installed. It will share with the API. So the API will only give you documentation that's relevant to your specific packages and the specific versions. So if you're using PEST2, you will get PEST2 documentation. If you're using PEST4, you will get PEST4 documentation. And that is the coolest thing by far. ([Time 0:17:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/905f2ab2-cea8-4192-b8e9-3b1bbd0fb42b)) - **Benchmark Boost Across Real Projects** - Ashley is building benchmarks to measure Boost's impact across varied Laravel projects and models. - Use empirical benchmarks to know when Boost materially improves AI output and where to focus improvements. Transcript: Ashley Hindle So I'll share it, and I will complete it, but it might not complete for when we launch so yeah one thing that i've been working on that i'm very passionate about is boost benchmarks so i'm Building an entire benchmark and evaluation system to show where cloud code or open code works better with boost than without boost. And so I have a bunch of projects of different styles. Some are Laravel 10, some are Laravel 12. Some use PEST, some use PHP units, some use Vue, some use React, some use Inertia, some use LiveWire, some use Flux, you know, Tailwind 3, Tailwind 4. Just a whole mess of different projects that I hope people have in real life. Then i have a bunch of evaluations and benchmarks to ask the ai to perform tasks on these projects and then i score the result of them did it do what it needed to do are we happy with the code Um things like that with and without boost and run it multiple times so there's no just, you know, random one off. And then at the end, we'll have a score and we can say, if you use boost, it is X percent better than if you don't use boost. But also excitingly for me, I can see where maybe it's only 1% better in this scenario. I'm like, okay, well, why? Like, how can I, improve that, right? And also, it lets you test it across different models. So GPT-5 came out. So I want to be able to say, if you use GPT-5 with boost versus Clawdsonnet 4 with boost, this one works better, this percent or something like that. So it's very difficult, though. I started on this thinking, oh, yeah, I know the rough pieces. I know how this will hang together. Matt Stauffer And then the more I get into it, the more I think I should have left this for somebody else. I'm just, yeah, I mean, even just trying to imagine what building a testing harness and framework for that would look like. Ashley Hindle And I'm like, yeah, that sounds like a lot of work especially in like a week so yeah i'm way too optimistic but i i really i don't think it's enough to say boost is awesome look at it called Tools i really i want to know and show it is beneficial in these scenarios and where it isn't great. ([Time 0:21:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/062f138f-5f10-49f9-aab0-1b8f6380f70a)) - **Start Small And Share Context** - To try AI, install Boost, open the project in Cursor, and start with small tasks like explaining code or writing a test. - Start small, share context, and treat AI as a junior pair programmer for better outcomes. Transcript: Ashley Hindle Next steps? Install Boost into a project and probably use cursor in that project. That would be my advice. That's the quickest, easiest way to do it. You can do it without installing Boost, but people will give up when the AI agent's quality isn't up to the standard, right? So I think if you install Boost, you will automatically get higher quality output. So I would recommend just open, even if you use PHP Storm, you use VS Code, you use NeoVim, I don't know what people are using. Just open it in Cursor and ask it, even just start with asking it to explain something. Like what's going on in this project? What's the path from this form to the database? And just let it show you that it understands the code base and it can do things. And then start super small. ([Time 0:25:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/079ff6e7-2dd2-4888-b9db-14a32a30a876)) - **MCP Server Package Enables Extensions** - Boost includes an MCP server package that makes registering local and remote MCP servers in Laravel easy via an ai.php file. - This foundation enables developers to add custom tools and remote MCP endpoints beyond local dev. Transcript: Ashley Hindle Not directly, but to be able to build Boost, we had to build an MCP server package. So when Boost releases, and it's released now, the MCP server package will also be released. And that makes it really, really easy to add MCP servers to your Laravel applications using a root slash ai.php file. You can register your MCP servers in there. It supports local servers via standard input output. It supports remote MCP servers and it supports more, they call them primitives in MCP land. So, you know, Boost just has tools right now, but it does support resources and prompts and other things also. And that is largely, whatever's passed largely, almost completely down to Peter Soom from Tailwind, who contracted with Lyrow for a bit. He did almost the entire MCP server package. ([Time 0:27:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/30a1dbf9-f05f-47ba-bbb4-a005dec23365)) - **Encourage Packages To Provide Guidelines** - Package authors should provide guidelines for Boost so AI agents know how to use their packages. - If automatic inclusion isn't ready, include a suggested guideline installation step for users. Transcript: Matt Stauffer It's not Livewire. It's like Ziggy. Like Titan's Ziggy package is a lot of places. But let's say it's not big enough or prominent enough for you all to load your own stuff. The packages get to contribute towards it? Ashley Hindle That's very high on the to-do list. I said on stage that packages would be able to provide their guidelines that would get composed with the other guidelines. And that is the path we want to take. But then when I got into it, there are so many gotchas. There are so many edge cases. And I've not solved them yet to make this a nice user experience. So I don't know what this looks like yet, but 100% we want to do that because I'm just a guy, right? I can't add guidelines for every package. So I am hopeful that packages can provide those guidelines on how AI agents should work with that package. But it might be a suggestion. We suggest that you install, add this guideline to boost. But then originally I was thinking that it would automatically be added. So we'll figure that out and we'll, you know, we'll do like a second mini release that packages can now provide guidelines, but I don't think it's going to be there for launch. ([Time 0:29:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/36478f69-568c-4251-9f5e-05f4d9accced)) - **Automate Docs, Curate Guidelines** - Documentation ingestion is automated and refreshed frequently, while guidelines remain manually curated. - Rely on automated doc updates for version changes but review guideline content manually when preferences shift. Transcript: Ashley Hindle Yeah. Matt Stauffer So the documentation is re-ingested and checked every day almost. Ashley Hindle So we're just going to automatically know about that. But any guidelines, they're manually created and curated. So if we were to make a change to the Laravel 12 guidelines and say, now our preference is that you use this attribute, not this old way, we'd have to manually go and do that. But one of the aims with Boost is to be pretty agnostic. ([Time 0:30:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/02fd15e3-46d0-4a6d-9d4b-6d6ea0dad70f)) - **Override Defaults With Project Rules** - Override Boost defaults by adding project-specific guidelines with higher priority or exclude tools you don't want. - Use exclusion and project rules to enforce your project's style when Boost's defaults conflict. Transcript: Ashley Hindle Solutions. So one way is a project specific guideline that says, actually, the previous guideline was wrong. You must never do this or else my entire project will set on fire and I'll be really sad. And then, you know, it should take that into account. Matt Stauffer It's sort of like the exclamation important in CSS. You just, if you say it strongly enough, it's going to prioritize that one over the previous ones. Ashley Hindle Exactly. You z-index 999 it. Yes, exactly. That gets priority, right? Yep. We do currently have a way to exclude tools. So if you don't want the browser logs MCP tool, you can exclude that tool and it just won't get registered, right? So I am wondering, should you be able to exclude guidelines? Maybe you don't like our guidelines for PEST and you're happy to write your own. That's fine, right? Just exclude them and then include your own project guidelines. So there's also that. ([Time 0:33:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fc392524-7d0d-4031-a5bf-649af1faf729)) - **Boost Built By A Team** - Ashley credited many collaborators like Peter Soom and others for making Boost possible and handling ingestion work. - He emphasized gratitude for teamwork after a lonely post-remote period of experimenting alone. Transcript: Ashley Hindle Mind is how awesome it is to work with such awesome people. Like, I've not done this alone. I've, Peter Soom did a ton of work. Somebody I used to work with, Catherine Binary Kitten, she's helped with the ingestion of docs and tidying up my mess. Pushback has joined Laravel recently. He's already ingested docs for so many packages and improved that code. Yeah, so when I left remote, I had this period of trying to figure out live. And that was pretty lonely, right? Just randomly sharing videos, hoping people saw them. And so now it feels like a really special place to work with like incredible people right like that's pretty special and i've realized i i need that in my day today so yeah i'm grateful Matt Stauffer For that that's amazing what a what a wonderful thing to end our episode on man uh thank you i'm glad you're here my friend i'm glad you're here aaron francis taking over all of our little Idioms. Cool. Well, thank you so much for hanging out. Thank you for your work here. If anybody is trying up Boost and they want to either follow along with development or they're like, hey, that Ashley guy is really great. Or if they want to kind of give you some feedback or collaborate with you, how do they get a hold of you? Ashley Hindle How do they keep up with what you're doing? Yeah, probably best on Twitter, Ashley Hindle, straightforward. I'm spending way too much time there. And when Boost is released, I'll be eagle eyeing all of the issues and all of the PR so people can use that. And actually Boost, one of the tools is to report feedback. So if you ask your agent, hey, tell boost this thing sucks. That will come directly to me. I'll cry for four seconds and then I'll fix it. ([Time 0:37:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/590291b5-cf19-434f-ba66-cc67f257c5d5))